Most of these “strategies” are common sense, and many of them you already know. The funny thing about high-pressure situations, though, is that common sense often goes out the window. If you review anything in the minutes before taking the test, review these strategies. Of course, that doesn't mean you should skip this section now. It's full of very useful hints, some of which might be new to you.
General Hint 1: Be Calm
The best way to do poorly on a test is to psych yourself out. If your mind starts thrashing about wildly, it will have a hard time settling on the right answers. There are a number of preventative measures you can take, beginning weeks or even months before you take the test. Buying this book was a good start: It's reassuring to see all the you'll need to ace the test in a compact, manageable form. But there are a number of other things you ought to keep in mind:
- Study in advance. If you've studied at regular intervals leading up to the test rather than cramming the night before, the will sit more easily in your mind.
- Be well rested. Get a good night's sleep on the two nights leading up to the test. If you're frazzled or wired, you're going to have a harder time buckling down and concentrating when it really counts.
- Come up for air. Don't assume that the best way to take an hour-long test is to spend the full hour nose to nose with the test questions. If it feels natural for you to take breathers, don't be afraid to do so. Lift your head occasionally, look about you, and take a deep breath—you may return to the test with a clearer mind.
General Hint 2: Grid Your Answers Carefully
No kidding. People make mistakes while entering their answers onto the grid and it can cost them big-time. This slipup occurs most frequently if you skip a question. If you left question 43 blank and then unthinkingly put the answer to question 44 into row 43, you could be starting a long, painful chain of wrong answers. Don't do it.
You can avoid this by filling in your answer sheet five questions at a time rather than one at a time, but if you feel that's too complicated, just be careful to check the number of the answer sheet against the question number each time.
General Hint 3: Pace Yourself
At the very least, aim to look at every question on the test. You can't afford to lose points because you didn't even get to a question you could have easily answered correctly. While you can spend an average of 42 seconds on each question, you'll probably breeze through some in 10 seconds and dwell on others for two minutes. Knowing how to pace yourself is a critical skill:
- Don’t dwell on any one question for too long. If you've spent a couple of minutes laboring over the question, you might just want to circle it and move on. If you feel the answer is on the tip of your tongue, it might come more easily if you revisit it later. Not only is it demoralizing to spend five minutes on a single question, it also eats up precious time in which you might have answered a number of easier questions.
- Nail the easy questions. As we said in the previous chapter, the questions will generally get progressively harder as you go through the test. Nonetheless, some tough ones will be thrown in right at the start, and hopefully you'll be finding ones that seem like a cinch right up until the end. Remember: you get as many points for correctly answering an easy question as a difficult one.
- Skip the unfamiliar. If you encounter a question you can't make heads or tails of, just circle it and move on. Don't work too hard trying to sort out what's going on. If you have time at the end, you can come back to it and see if you can make an educated guess. Your first priority should be to get all the easy questions, and your second priority should be to get through the questions you can solve with some work. Unfamiliar material should be at the bottom of your list of priorities.
